I have severe mental health problems. I have the diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder. Crisis Resolution Team refuse to help properly. They say they cannot do anything as you have personality disorder and they suggest I just sit and watch films or go out for a walk. (Consider it is 11.11pm).

In my opinion, my Community Mental Health Team nurse is is not at all useful or helpful to me. Again I get the same reaction off her. They refuse to admit me to Becklin now and I am left feeling suicidal. Is this really on?

This has also happened to a good friend of mine and she gets told the exact same thing because she has personality disorder. Are your staff trained to just push people with personality disorder to one side?

I would love to see how they would live with this illness. This really needs sorting as they are really putting my life and others at serious risk. I also got told that I know what I am doing when I attempted to kill myself but in fact no I do not know.

Their attitude absolutely stinks and needs to change. I don't think they realise they are putting peoples lives at risk. In my opinion, they all need retraining by the looks of things. I do not appreciate being left in the state that I am in now and I am pretty sure others with severe mental health problems do not also appreciate this. I believe the whole situation is disgusting.

This has happened numerous times to me and I cannot take it any longer.

Responses

Response from
Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust 3 years ago

Dear lmh,

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your experience with the crisis team and the community mental health team in Leeds. I am truly sorry that your experience has not been a helpful one. Feedback of this nature is invaluable to help us continually evaluate our services and to help us to improve the support we offer.

I’m sorry you feel the crisis team seemed to have declined to admit you to the Becklin Centre, and that you feel you are not getting the help you need from your community mental health nurse.

Without knowing your particular case, it’s difficult to respond in specific detail. We sometimes do need to consider hospital admission but always as a last resort, so we aim to try to support people at home as much as we can. The decision to admit someone to hospital is always done carefully and following a thorough assessment of their needs.

It would be helpful to understand more about your personal experience of this so we can look at anything we need to learn about the way our services respond to people in crisis. We also need to ensure that your own individual needs are currently being met.

With your full involvement, part of your community mental health nurse’s role is to develop a care plan and crisis plan that helps you and others involved in your care to know what to do when you are experiencing a crisis. Again, it would be helpful to us to understand in more detail what it is you feel isn’t helpful or useful for you from your nurse.

I’m very aware that it’s difficult to promise specific action points in a response here, but I do want to take the time to openly acknowledge the distress, anger and frustration that this situation has obviously caused you. This is clearly not the outcome we want for you, and we would like the chance to work with you to put it right.

It seems that it would be useful for us to be able to get in touch and find out what support you need, so one of the things I’d like to invite you to do is to contact us so we can look into this further.

In order for us to do this I wonder if you would contact our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) who can take your details and get in touch with us and your care coordinator. PALS can be contacted on 0800 0525 790 or at pals.lypft@nhs.net.

I sincerely hope that we can improve things together, and again thank you for your posting here on Patient Opinion.